How to Start a Blog That Actually Makes You Money

The concept of making money with a blog in Kenya is a little confusing even to the most talented bloggers in Kenya. How do you make money from your blog? Like really, without all the talk and nothing for the walk.

I run this blog, which is primarily targeted to the Kenyan audience. It nets me around 15K per month. So how do I do it?

It is simple. Before you can think of monetizing your blog, you need to have clear objectives about what you want to achieve with your blog. When creating your blog, start by asking yourself these questions:

1. What will I blog about?
2. Who will my audience be, which age group, economic status? etc
3. What do you want to achieve from your blog? Are you looking to blog as a way of expressing yourself? Or do you want to make money from your blog or are you looking for a combination of the two.

These three questions hold the key to monetizing your blog.

Let us take a look at each one of them separately:

 What Will I Blog About?

What you blog about dictates how you monetize your blog.

Most of the blogs in Kenya are News and Celeb Gossip Blogs. Examples include the Kenyan Post, Ghafla, Nairobi Exposed among others.

These blogs receive a lot of traffic on each single day. They can therefore rely on Adsense for their revenue.

This does not mean that you should also start a news blog. In fact, now might be the worst time to start your blog after Facebook announced that it is cracking its whip on click-bait news feeds.

What you blog about should be informed by what you are most passionate about, your business or your life in particular.

Who is the Audience of my Blog?

Do they have the buying capability?

A lot of new bloggers in Kenya make the mistake of targeting their blogs to their friends. Make sure you do not make the same mistake if you want to make money from your blog.

The best audience to target are people who have a need to fulfill.

For instance, I personally target this blog to people who want to make money online. After I have established who my audience is, I can then start thinking of the needs they might have and how I can help them meet those needs.

For instance, a lot of people who want to make money online are in need of information. I could therefore go out of my way, research and package such information and offer lessons for a price (although I rarely do that).

What you can do, for instance if you are a nutritionist is come up with content that is so valuable that people will want to chuck out money to get hold of it.

What Do You Want to Achieve With Your Kenyan Blog?

People have different motivations when it comes to blogging. Ask yourself what you really want to achieve from your blog.

Do you want your friends to recognize you as this funny guy who blogs or are you looking to make money from blogging?

Your objectives when you are starting off will determine whether you can monetize your blog.